Marchers raise questions about deaths involving Memphis police

Marching down Main Street with cardboard signs written in memory of lost loved ones, 40 members of a new activist group in Memphis raised their voices in unity with a cry for justice that echoed through Downtown streets Saturday afternoon.

"Stop Police Murder," they chanted on a march organized by husband-and-wife activists who list ties to the former Black Panther Party. The husband also was sentenced to life in prison for hijacking an airliner to Cuba in 1969. "Prosecute the cops!"

Marching more slowly than the rest of the group, with tears streaming down her face, Brenda Davis, whose son Lorenzo died after being arrested on suspicion of drug-selling in July, said she couldn't rest without answers as to how her son's life ended.

"I want answers, and everything is 'pending,'" she said. "The investigation, the toxicology report…I want justice."

JoNina Abron-Ervin and Lorenzo Ervin organized the protest that started outside the FedExForum near Beale Street, where Memphis police fatally shot a 19-year-old man armed with a knife in June, to a rally outside City Hall.

With a group started in June called the Memphis Black Autonomy Federation and a Facebook page labeled "The Body Count: Police Murder in Memphis," the Whitehaven couple called the Aug. 26 crash that killed a Senatobia, Miss., mother and daughter in car hit by a Memphis squad car an act of police brutality.

Armed with questions by some families of the men who died, they also are pressing for answers to what they call "cover-ups" in the police shootings this year of Jermie McCraven, 20, on Feb. 10, Dewayne Bailey, 38, on May 10, Freeman on June 12 and Hernando Dowdy, 36, on June 27.

In addition, the group is highlighting the deaths of Davis, 28, after his arrest July 2, and William Howlett, 41, after being taken into custody March 9. Both men had fled and had physical confrontations with officers; Davis was sweating profusely and had an accelerated heart rate and Howlett became unresponsive, police reported.

Although Memphis police released media statements about the shootings and deaths in custody, and reported that officers had been cleared of wrongdoing, Abron-Ervin noted that no details of the cases have been aired publicly.

Efforts to obtain a response from Memphis police about the group's allegations were unsuccessful.

Families like Dewayne Bailey's, Abron-Ervin said, are left with no official answers to questions about his death. The family claims in a letter to City Council members that Bailey was shot "over 32 times."

According to police, he dragged an officer with his car and rammed two squad cards after being awakened by police in his Ford Taurus that night in May on Horn Lake Road.

"We live in a police state," Lorenzo Ervin said Saturday. "Police kill our loved ones and ain't nobody say nothing. We need to come together on a statewide level and speak out about the brutality."

Abron-Ervin, 64, retired in 2003 as an associate professor of journalism at Western Michigan University, where her online biography includes expertise in the Black Power-era and time as editor of the Black Panther newspaper. She said they have lived in Memphis for a couple of years.

According to court records, a biography on the Wikipedia website and other online sources, Lorenzo Ervin, 65, became a civil rights activist at an early age in Chattanooga, joined groups including the Black Panther Party and hijacked an airliner from Atlanta to Havana, Cuba, in 1969. While sentenced to life in federal prison, he was released after about 15 years. Described as an anarchist, he has protested against police brutality and other issues in cities including Chattanooga, Nashville and Atlanta.